Tran Ngoc Toàn

Tran Ngoc Toàn (1940-) was a Lieutenant Colonel in the South Vietnamese Marines during the Vietnam War.

Biography
Tran Ngoc Toàn was born in Da Lat, French Indochina (near Saigon), and he became a Vietnamese nationalist while he was in school, looking at the French colonizers as his enemies. After Vietnamese independence, he attended the Military Academy of Vietnam and joined the South Vietnamese Marines at the age of 22. He was wounded and left for dead at the December 1964 Battle of Binh Gia during the Vietnam War while serving as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was taken to a Korean military hospital and healed, and he continued to fight in the war until its end in 1975. Tran was captured and sent to the Lao Cai labor camp, and he was there for a decade before being released to Indonesia. From there, he travelled to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, and he later became a house painter and printer in Washington DC. In August 2005, he retired from The Washington Post and moved to Houston, Texas, and he was often interviewed about his experiences in the war.